Notes

Scroll down for a running conversation from readers and others on the best ideas for responding to ISIS, inspired by The Atlantic’s project “What to Do About ISIS?,” featuring essays from a variety of foreign policy experts. Email us at hello@theatlantic.com.

Since we published the big piece from David Ignatius that primed our ongoing examination of the ISIS conundrum, two other pieces have entered the fold: Martha Crenshaw and Lisa Blaydes scrutinize Ignatius’s call for reconciliation among Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, while Frederic C. Hof emphasizes that “protecting civilians from Assad is the first step toward the settlement David Ignatius deems essential.” A few readers join in:

Thank you for allowing me to contribute to this debate. The two actions that the U.S. must implement immediately to decisively influence a favorable outcome to the situation in the Middle East are:

1) We must make every anti-ISIS country and faction accept that they have to commit the vast majority of the ground troops needed to confront ISIS. It’s their neighborhood, not ours. Significant numbers of U.S. boots on the ground only produces negative results.

2) We must compel the current Iraqi Shia government to include the Iraqi Sunnis in the central government. This might save Iraq from eventual political disintegration and keep Iran’s influence to an acceptable minimum.

Another reader doesn’t think such Sunni-Shia integration is really possible or even preferable:

Here is the best alternative we have for solving the ISSI conundrum: Simply defend the remaining lands of the country that has been known as Iraq while ISIS consolidates its territorial gains, then broker some demilitarized zones and ersatz borders with neighboring countries.

Then the region would have what the British and French should have drawn up a century ago: a Sunni country (Islamic State or whatever), a Shiite country (Southeast Iraq or whatever) and ideally a Kurdish State, which may not be allowed officially by Turkey but may exist in a de facto semi-autonomous form for a few decades.

Not exactly what America regards as a win? Not an ego-booster for the country with more power and money than anyone else? Certainly not. But it is the logical end to what America’s idiotic invasion set in motion more than a decade ago. What reasonable observer ever thought it could turn out differently? If the U.S. destabilizes a country politically, militarily and economically, is there some magic way it quickly rights itself, peacefully or violently?

The country we call Iraq is a 20th Century fantasy, a naïve, arrogant concoction of Westerners. An arbitrary border drawn around separate lands inhabited by vastly different peoples. A mashup destined to be ruled by a succession of despots, left alone as long as they signed contracts with Western oil companies and mostly stayed inside their artificial borders. When the leading Western powers forcibly removed Iraq’s last dictator, the breakup of that nation was assured almost as soon as we pulled out our armies.

Any suggestion that the USA and its half-hearted allies respond to ISIS by temporarily driving it underground is, at best, another Western powers’ fantasy. If we foolishly expend more billions of dollars and thousands of America lives for a few years, we merely postpone the inevitable: a Sunni controlled region in a traditional Sunni land.

So if the endgame is a Sunni-led government, do Americans really care if it is a model democracy or a caliphate? We care only in the most abstracted sense—which is ultimately driven by our own values and not those of the locals.

Sure, we would feel bad about an ISIS government chopping off hands and heads, stoning adulterers and imposing severe dress codes on women. But remember the thing that has prevented America from so far using its full military might: to kill all the insurgents, an army must kill most of the innocent civilians nearby. Nobody wants to prevent women from wearing berkas by bombing them.

If ISIS gets to keep some territory, would a lot of inhabitants become refugees? Yes, but probably no more than those fleeing the dangers of perpetual combat in their homeland.

Think about what America fears most from ISIS. We are overwhelmingly concerned with ISIS jihadists sneaking around the USA and committing acts of violence. But what terrifies us most are the stateless terrorists, the ones with no homeland for us to counterstrike immediately. Well, if ISIS is a state, we have people and places to retaliate against. And their leaders will know we are really, really good at that.

Moreover, to give credit to the Sunnis of the region for being actual human beings, once they have a nation they can turn their attention to nation-building instead of nation-endangering. How is that not an acceptable outcome for the United States?

Nothing, a reader essentially says in response to the question posed by Uri:

It’s weird. EVERYTHING I read on the subject starts with the assumption that SOMETHING has to be done about ISIS, and that WE, America, must at least participate in that something. But why? ISIS is not a threat to the U.S., there’s no real compelling interest for U.S. in preserving the Iraqi regime—or even the Iraqi borders. There are regional actors that have a MUCH greater national interest in resisting or rolling up the Islamic State. Turkey, Saudi, Egypt, and Iran all have powerful militaries, and if they aren’t interested in fighting ISIS, I can see no reason why the U.S. should.

Before we can have any kind of national conversation about WHAT to do about ISIS, we should first arrive at some kind of consensus about WHY we should do anything at all. Yes, they are a particularly bad bunch, but if that’s the basis for deciding who we should go to war against, we’re going to need a much bigger army.

We can rule out some for being unworkable or non-viable from a political standpoint. A ground offensive seems to be a non-starter, even though it’s likely the best plan from a pure tactical standpoint. U.S. forces on the ground aren’t politically popular, and local regional forces are too weak or unwilling to make up the gap. If the Turkish Gov-PKK conflict hadn’t broken out, maybe things would be different, but what-ifs can’t save us here.

Likewise, containment is a non-starter. Not because it won’t work, because there is at least some chance it might, and intelligent people like Stephen Walt have argued for it as a viable policy. But because geopolitics makes it an impossible choice. The U.S. would lose too much influence and reputation in the region and internationally by standing aside from a group that is so clearly reviled and hated. Rwanda seems to have taught U.S. policymakers a lesson on trying to stand aside, and for better or worse the U.S. is the world hegemon and a major player in the Middle East.

So that leaves the unfortunate policy we’re already following: a slow effort to wear down the Islamic State while at the same time building up forces or finding proxies to win the ground battle. The U.S. has used YPG units [Syrian Kurdish forces], though they’re been dogged with controversy, and the ISF [Iraqi security forces] and to a lesser extent the Hashid al-Shaabi in Iraq [the militias also known as Popular Mobilization Forces].

None of these are long-term solutions, except the ISF, which I don’t think anyone expects to overpower sectarian militias in the near future. Working to force some sort of political restructuring and settlement in Iraq is a must, because without finding an answer to Sunni discontent, even those proxies won’t be enough. Only Anbar Sunnis can truly retake and hold Anbar. The balance between keeping Baghdad and Erbil happy and empowering Sunnis will be a fine one, and I’m not convinced we’re up to the task. But the path is fairly clear.

The problem with this strategy is that our efforts to degrade capabilities are limited to Iraq and Syria. Even if we make gains in that theatre, and some have been made, the Islamic State is spreading. Affiliate groups from the Sinai to Libya to Yemen have been having success, and maintaining at least some control over territory. So far, U.S. policymakers have been loathe to consider those areas, rationally fearing mission creep, but that risks dumping blood and treasure into Iraq or Syria, only to have them shift their base to another conflict zone. Is the Islamic State less dangerous in Libya than Iraq?

I’m not sure what the answer is for beating the Islamic State. It might well come down to some U.S. ground troops, at least within Iraq. The DoD considers this a long-term problem, and they’re right to do so. But the apparent lack of concern for other Islamic State affiliates suggests to me that the U.S. is getting close to suffering from a dangerously narrow view. The Islamic State is an insurgency linked to Sunni discontent in Iraq and Syria, but it is also an international terrorist group that can function outside the realm of a traditional insurgency. It worries me that U.S. policy seems to be contradicting itself, focusing on either one aspect or the other rather than the whole. We’re focused narrowly on the military aspect of conflict in Iraq and Syria, and to a lesser extent the political aspects, but not addressing the regional issues that underpin the problem.

The so-called Arab Spring failed. Or more broadly, the non-violent portion of it largely failed. This second phase, where most of the world is comfortable supporting Arab autocrats once again and using them to “fight terror,” is providing openings for the Islamic State to expand beyond Iraq and Syria. There won’t be any successful policy if we refuse to address that.

Fifty years ago, America’s escalating war in Vietnam came under a degree of scrutiny it had long escaped. In February of 1965, Lyndon Johnson’s administration launched “Operation Rolling Thunder”—a bombing campaign against North Vietnam, designed to compel the communists in Hanoi to stop sponsoring the Vietcong insurgency in the South. The U.S. State Department promptly issued a white paper defending its use of air power to save South Vietnam from a “new kind of war”—a “brutal campaign of terror and armed attack” nurtured by a malicious state. This earned a rebuttal from the investigative journalist I.F. Stone, who used the State Department’s own data to demonstrate that the Vietcong was actually receiving little material support from the North, and to argue that the U.S. government, in its rush to rally the American public for battle, was obscuring a key fact: The conflict in South Vietnam was not the product of an unprecedented form of aggression by the North Vietnamese, but rather a genuine civil war.

The contours of the coming debate had been sketched out, to be filled in just weeks later at the University of Michigan during the country’s first “teach-in.” More than 3,000 students and faculty gathered to protest America’s intensifying military involvement in Vietnam through lectures and policy discussions. Thousands of copies of the State Department’s white paper and Stone’s rebuttal were distributed. “We are searching for alternatives,” one organizer explained. “We want at least to stimulate people’s thinking, enabling them to develop positions.” Outside the all-night affair, a counter-demonstrator held a sign asking, “Will Vietnam = Munich?” He promised to register his disagreement with those who opposed the war not with violence or shouting, but by peppering the lecturing professors with questions. Dozens of universities soon staged their own teach-ins. The anti-war movement spread nationally, as the American war itself metastasized.

Today, in the fight against ISIS, we find ourselves at a similar juncture: The war seems of a new kind; the enemy uncommonly brutal; the military campaign against it limited, but potentially limitless. There are plenty ofdifferences between the conflict in Vietnam and the battle against ISIS; among other things, communism has little in common with jihadism (though perhaps not as little as you may think), and North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union in the context of the Cold War, whereas ISIS is affiliated with no other state or larger interstate struggle. But the task of understanding the nature of the adversary, the struggle in which that adversary is engaged, and the full spectrum of thinking on how to confront it is as urgent today as it was in 1965.

As Russia bombs ISIS (and other armed opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad) in Syria, and Iran-backed Shiite militias battle the Islamic State on the ground, the U.S. government is planning to move American ground troops closer to the frontlines in Iraq and Syria, amid frustration that the billions spent on U.S-led airstrikes against ISIS have resulted in little more than a stalemate. At the same time, the United States, Russia, Iran, and other powers are signaling tentative openness to a long-elusive diplomatic solution to the Syrian Civil War. (For more on who’s fighting whom, and how it’s going, check out Kathy Gilsinan’s guide to the Syrian conflict.)

So what’s the best way for the United States, and the world, to respond to ISIS? Channeling something of the spirit of that first teach-in in 1965, The Atlantic is launching a new project—“What to Do About ISIS?”—where we’ll regularly be asking experts to present their best ideas for how to counter the Islamic State, and then inviting others to interrogate those options and their feasibility. We’re interested in the practicalities and specifics of implementing policies and strategies in a messy world, not vague prescriptions or ideal solutions.

Graeme Wood actually got this conversation started back in March in his Atlantic cover story on ISIS’s religious convictions. Here’s what he suggested at the time:

Given everything we know about the Islamic State, continuing to slowly bleed it, through air strikes and proxy warfare, appears the best of bad military options. Neither the Kurds nor the Shia will ever subdue and control the whole Sunni heartland of Syria and Iraq—they are hated there, and have no appetite for such an adventure anyway. But they can keep the Islamic State from fulfilling its duty to expand. And with every month that it fails to expand, it resembles less the conquering state of the Prophet Muhammad than yet another Middle Eastern government failing to bring prosperity to its people.

In the inaugural essay for The Atlantic’s new project, David Ignatius of The Washington Post traces the long roots of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, drawing on years of reporting in both countries to chronicle America’s cascade of mistakes in the region, depict the “culture of death” into which the United States was initiated, and emphasize the need for persistent U.S. engagement in the region, especially with Iraq’s Sunnis. He suggests that major powers with a stake in defeating ISIS fully commit to a staged program of stabilization—a process that first empowers local actors militarily (in Iraq, standing up a Sunni tribal force; in Syria, fusing the moderate opposition with elements of the Syrian military; in both countries, establishing safe zones), and then politically (in Iraq, a new federalist system of government; in Syria, a post-Assad transition process).

Ignatius elaborates:

The story of ISIS teaches the same basic lesson that emerged from America’s other failures in the Middle East over the last decade: Attempts by the United States or Islamist rebels to topple authoritarian regimes—in Iraq, Libya, and now Syria—create power vacuums. This empty political space will be filled by extremists unless the United States and its allies build strong local forces that can suppress terrorist groups and warlords both. When the U.S. creates such local forces, it must be persistent. If it withdraws from these efforts, as America did in Iraq in 2011, it invites mayhem. Halfway American intervention has produced nothing but trouble. Rebels have gotten enough support to continue fighting, but not enough to win.

History teaches that such wars end through a combination of the exhaustion of local combatants and an agreement among major regional and international powers on a formula to curtail the fighting and rebuild some governance. Usually the settlement ratifies the informal cantonal boundaries that have emerged during the fighting, so that each sect has what amounts to a “safe zone” in a decentralized state that functions under the umbrella of the old nation. That’s what happened in Lebanon with the Taif Agreement in 1989, and it’s probably the best that can be hoped for in Iraq and Syria. To reduce human suffering on the way to such a new equilibrium, it’s important, where possible, to back moderate forces as they create the safe zones that will eventually form the pieces of the new federal state—and that provide platforms for attacking extremist groups. Middle Eastern wars rarely end with outright victory and permanent stability, so the word “settlement” may promise too much. At best, for many years, it may simply mean stable ceasefire lines, reduced bloodshed, fewer refugees, and less terrorism.

We hope you’ll follow the debate, and contribute to it by sending us your thoughts, reactions, and links to hello@theatlantic.com.

Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

In the early 1980s, the world of school book fairs was “a highly competitive and very secretive industry,” according to a New York Timesarticleat the time. The fairs numbered in the thousands and spanned the United States. They were put on by a mix of organizers: A few national corporations, about 25 to 30 regional companies, and assorted bookstores.

By the 1990s, one organizer reigned: the Scholastic Corporation. Scholastic, founded in 1920 to publish books and magazines aimed at young readers, had purchased several of its smaller competitors. The company became the largest operator of children’s book fairs in the country, a title it still holds today.

But we’re not here to talk about Scholastic’s business history, and I think you know that. If you’re a young adult who attended elementary school in the United States, I’d guess that when you saw the headline on this story, something deep inside your mind cracked open. With an unmistakable pang of nostalgia,the memory of a Scholastic book fair, with all its concomitant joys, came flooding in.

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrives in Congress with a bigger megaphone than any other House freshman. How's she going to use it?

QUEENS, N.Y.—“Choosing not to speak,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was telling me one day last month, “is taken and read just as deliberately as choosing to speak.”

Fresh off her upset primary victory over Representative Joe Crowley here, the nation’s most famous congressional candidate was speaking pretty much everywhere this summer—stumping for fellow progressives all over the country, hitting the late-night talk shows, and jousting with her many conservative critics on Twitter.

Last week, Ocasio-Cortez made her Washington debut in similar fashion.

In town for the biannual weeklong orientation session for newly elected members of Congress, the 29-year-old progressive star from the Bronx narrated the experience in Instagram stories to her 642,000 followers, complained about being mistaken for a congressional spouse or intern on Twitter, and called out a conservative journalist who suggested she was dressed too fancily for “a girl who struggles.”

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.

Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

In the early 1980s, the world of school book fairs was “a highly competitive and very secretive industry,” according to a New York Timesarticleat the time. The fairs numbered in the thousands and spanned the United States. They were put on by a mix of organizers: A few national corporations, about 25 to 30 regional companies, and assorted bookstores.

By the 1990s, one organizer reigned: the Scholastic Corporation. Scholastic, founded in 1920 to publish books and magazines aimed at young readers, had purchased several of its smaller competitors. The company became the largest operator of children’s book fairs in the country, a title it still holds today.

But we’re not here to talk about Scholastic’s business history, and I think you know that. If you’re a young adult who attended elementary school in the United States, I’d guess that when you saw the headline on this story, something deep inside your mind cracked open. With an unmistakable pang of nostalgia,the memory of a Scholastic book fair, with all its concomitant joys, came flooding in.

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrives in Congress with a bigger megaphone than any other House freshman. How's she going to use it?

QUEENS, N.Y.—“Choosing not to speak,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was telling me one day last month, “is taken and read just as deliberately as choosing to speak.”

Fresh off her upset primary victory over Representative Joe Crowley here, the nation’s most famous congressional candidate was speaking pretty much everywhere this summer—stumping for fellow progressives all over the country, hitting the late-night talk shows, and jousting with her many conservative critics on Twitter.

Last week, Ocasio-Cortez made her Washington debut in similar fashion.

In town for the biannual weeklong orientation session for newly elected members of Congress, the 29-year-old progressive star from the Bronx narrated the experience in Instagram stories to her 642,000 followers, complained about being mistaken for a congressional spouse or intern on Twitter, and called out a conservative journalist who suggested she was dressed too fancily for “a girl who struggles.”

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.